28/06/2018 ‘Strelec’ in the GULAG: Eduard Streltsov’s Incarceration and Survival in the Vyatlag Archipelago - Russian Football News

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Streltsov’s
LAST TWEETS
Incarceration and WHAT HAVE WE JUST WITNESSED

Survival in the IN KAZAN?!?!?

https://t.co/rrltp2ib5G, Jun 27
We’re back at the Kazan Arena for

Vyatlag Archipelago Germany vs South Korea. Gonna be

a good size crowd but definitely the
JANUARY 21, 2016 BY JAMES NICKELS LEAVE A COMMENT
quietest Ka…
https://t.co/ax0HORnOqH, Jun 27
RT @RFN_David: For the
Confederations Cup last year, a
mural of Ronaldo was put up on the
hotel where Portugal were staying.
Mess… https://t.co/Eg6ELRbhuQ,
Jun 27

Russ
N

OUR FRIENDS

A Russian Postage stamp bearing Streltsov. Circulated in December 20 ProSpartak

Football” in the build-up to the 2018 World Cup. S Rubin Hoods
Footballski
Curse of the Råsunda
Right Bank Warsaw
World Football Index
Råsunda Stadium in Stockholm – for many Russian football fans a
name synonymous with mythic tales of what might have been for the
national sport, and their star player, Eduard Anatoliyevich Streltsov
the “Russian Pelé”. Like so many other would-be football superstars
he was tragically robbed of his career and could even be recalled as
the “Russian Duncan Edwards”.

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28/06/2018 ‘Strelec’ in the GULAG: Eduard Streltsov’s Incarceration and Survival in the Vyatlag Archipelago - Russian Football News

The 1958 World Cup was the watershed moment in Brazilian Pelé’s
career, on 29 June the then seventeen-year-old scored a brace in the
5-2 Final win over hosts Sweden in the Råsunda Stadium, Solna. Just
a month earlier, Streltsov suffered the nadir of his own career. He
entered Eduard Karakhanov’s dacha in 25 May as the star of the
Soviet Union national team and idol of Torpedo Moscow, but left in
the hands of the KGB.

Streltsov was convicted of rape, and awaiting trial incarcerated in the

GULAG system as the USSR were knocked out at the Quarter Final
stage, by Sweden at the Råsunda. On 26 June 1955, it was against
Sweden, again at the Råsunda that he made his debut for the Soviet
national team, scoring a hat-trick (the first player ever to do so for the
USSR on his debut) in a 6-0 win. The USSR’s golden generation led
by Streltsov himself, Captain Igor Netto, goalkeeper Lev Yashin and
Torpedo striking-partner Valentin Ivanov all started in the friendly.

1956 Summer Olympics

Streltsov by this point had scored 48 goals in 89 appearances for

Torpedo and 18 in 21 for the USSR, yet had not won any silverware.
His zenith, the 1956 Olympic Games is a microcosm of his future. He
scored against West Germany in the First Round. In the Semi-Final
against Bulgaria, the USSR trailed 1-0 with Ivanov suffering a strain
injury and right-back Nikolay Tyschenko continuing to play despite
breaking his collarbone. Streltsov equalised in the 112th minute then
set-up Boris Tatushin for the winner in the 116th.

Despite single-handedly dragging a battered and bruised USSR

team through to the Final against Yugoslavia, Streltsov and the
injured-Ivanov were replaced by Spartak pair Nikita Simonyan (who
would later captain the USSR at the World Cup, aged 32) and Sergei
Salinkov as the head coach – Gavriil Kachalin – preferred club
partnerships playing up-front. The USSR still went on to win 1-0
through Anatoli Ilyin. This foreshadows Streltsov’s future, being
robbed of the biggest stage to perform upon; he did not even earn a
winners medal as only the starting XI of the Final were granted them.
Although Simonyan did offer him his medal, Streltsov refused and
reportedly replied, “Nikita, I will win many others…this is yours”.

Mural of Streltsov at the Eduard Streltsov Stadium. S

Mural of Streltsov at the Eduard Streltsov Stadium. So

Guilty?

On the evening of the 25th, Streltsov, Tatushin and Mikhail Ogonkov

went to a party hosted by returning army officer Eduard Karakhonov.
The trio met Marina Lebedeva at the party, a socialite who paid
particular interest to Streltsov. Many witnesses at the party claim that
he was “seduced by her”, the daughter of an army colonel. She next
day she wrote a letter to the Moscow public prosecutor;

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“ ‘On 25 May 1958, in a dacha next to the school in

the village of Pravda, I was raped by Streltsov
Eduard Anatoliyevich. I ask he be brought to
justice’.

Lebedeva also wrote a letter accusing Ogonkov, but all three were
charged. Yet only Streltsov did not return to Tarasovka (the national
team’s training base) the following morning. Streltsov confessed to
the rape, and was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment while the
other two received three year disqualifications from football.
Aleksandr Nilin, in Streltsov (2002), claims he only confessed as was
told by the KGB he could play in the World Cup if he done so, and
was subsequently convicted amidst inconclusive evidence on 24
July 1958 – three days after his 21st birthday. Nilin further claims over
100,000 factory workers from the ZiL-factory (the World War Two
munitions factory in which Torpedo were created by) planned a
protest in support but disbanded upon hearing news of his
confession. Before this, on 30 May, Lebedeva sent the public
prosecutor another letter, claiming;

“ ‘I ask that the criminal proceedings against

Streltsov Eduard Anatoliyevich be stopped,
because I forgive him’.

Yet she withdrew this letter hurriedly only a day later, suggesting a
conspiracy. Lebedeva also recanted the letter accusing Ogkonov,
writing to the public prosecutor on 27 May, asking;

“ ‘…to consider my application submitted to you of

rape by Ogonkov…I have submitted a statement
without thinking and therefor I apologise’.

This plea was accepted by the public prosecutor, yet the claim
against Streltsov was dismissed. There are two machinations at play;
the first that Streltsov, an east-Moscow Perovo native chose to play
for his local team Torpedo embarrassed the KGB-owned Dynamo
and army-owned CDKA Moscow, proving himself unpopular in the
All-Union Council of Fitness Culture of USSR and the Football
Federation of USSR – just as Simonyan was ostracised for choosing
Spartak over the “big two”.

Streltsov also had numerous brushes with the party in the run-up to
the events of 25 May 1958. In November 1957 He and Ivanov missed
a train from Moscow to Leipzig ahaead of a 1958 World Cup qualifier
play-off against Poland – forcing the Peoples’ Commissar of the

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Railways, B.P. Beshchev to order the train to be stopped in the

suburb of Mozhaisk to allow the pair to board.

A few days before the USSR were to travel to China in January 1958,
Streltsov was involved in a brawl with police at a Moscow metro
station and convicted of ‘minor-scale hooliganism’. He was withdrawn
from the USSR squad by the State Committee of Physical Culture,
and only made the World Cup squad through a public apology.

However, the second machination was his most dangerous verse of

his dance with the party authorities. Many in the party had
considered him becoming too much of a “celebrity”, a “capitalist
influence” and his womanising brought him to conflict with the only
ever female Politburo member, Yekaterina Furtseva. She met him at a
reception at the Kremlin celebrating the gold medal in the Olympics
in 1957, and purportedly mentioned a possible marriage to her
daughter, Svetlana. Apparently he replied “I have a fiancée and will
not marry her”, which Furtseva took as a great slight. According to
Jonathan Wilson, he was heard later disparaging Svetlana, claiming
“I would never marry that monkey”. The Football Federation publicly
criticised him numerous times following this, once for a sending off
that was not “hero-like” and condemned his marriage before a
friendly with Romania in which an internal memo read “this [his
marriage] shows the weak educational work at Torpedo”. The crucial
part of this case is Khrushchev’s reported knowledge of the case,
who reportedly ordered his sending to prison as soon as he found
out.

Wilson was shown a collection of letters by Nikita Simonyan which

showed both a bruise Lebedeva and Streltsov, yet when asked of the
question of guilt, he claimed;

“ ‘It is a mysterious thing. He wrote to his mother

saying he was taking the blame for someone
else…the system punished Streltsov’

Just who did Streltsov take the blame for, one of the other players?
Khrushchev? Or maybe it was merely an attempt at softening the
blow his mother received.

Streltsov’s Experience in Vyatlag

Despite being initially sentenced a twelve-year internment, Streltsov

only served 5 years and was released in 1963 – this is an especially
rare occurrence with the norm a prisoners’ term being “stretched”.
Yet he was not actually “released early”. After the highly publicised
case, an “indoor court” took place during the World Cup itself. The
twelve-year sentence was reduced in this court, as Streltsov was
defended by famous Moscow lawyer Milovsky, but most interestingly
is this court ignored the previous rule of law presented in the Moscow
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public prosecution, as he once again was asked to confess in order

to form a deal, and sent to Vyatlag in the far-north of the Kirov Oblast.

Very little of Streltsov’s experience incarcerated is known, except that

he was purportedly beaten by a fellow prisoner and spending four
months in the prison hospital, with a report claiming he was ‘hit either
by an iron bar or a shoe’. He was later moved to a section of the
camp in which the warden was a football fan and had him playing for
the prison camp teams to increase morale. But there is
some recorded in the State Archive of the Kirov Region.

The old railway station at Vyatlag, Streltsov arrived as a prisoner here in a

Source: http://www.vyatlag.ru

It is recorded that he did not arrive to a great ceremony or pomp, but

merely as just one of many prisoners arriving at Lesnoy – the
settlement closest to the camp. From here, special carts would
transport them further. Initially those sent to Vyatlag would be kulaks
– the ‘rich peasants’ deemed ‘un-socialist’ – but after Stalin’s death in
1953 the camp population was composed of career criminals, actors,
artists, poets, academics and one footballer. All of which were
convicted either of rape, murder or ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ under
Article 58. The camp was once mainly used for prisoners-of-war but
they had all been returned, released or died by 1958.

Streltsov lived off a general diet of bread – made using watery dough
due to the marshland surrounding the camp – and containing bran,
barley and buckwheat which gave it a “bluish colouring” and “tasted
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worse than foul”, according to an inmate and ex-construction

engineer Yury Yurkevich, arrested under Article 58.

One record of the camp archives record the fates of rapists in the
camp committing suicide early in their stay. One ex-inmate, Irina
Moiseyevna claimed; “anyone who is sent down for that crime is
simply passed from one to another, that’s the code of the
underworld”. This will corroborate reports that Streltsov was attacked
early in his stay and put under increased protection. Some claim this
person was involved with the government, but the likelier claim is that
the attack was retribution for his sentence.

Vladimir Veremyev, a local researcher of the camp claimed the death

rates were extraordinarily high, he compared Vyatlag and
Buchenwald, finding that the former had 90,000 on register, with 24%
(21,000) of them dying as compared to only 14% at Buchenwald
(33,000 of 236,000).

Streltsov survived the camp relatively unharmed following his initial

beating, protected by the guards. But he also increasingly earned
the admiration of his comrades in the camp, apparently through his
performances in matches and shows of skill to impress fellow
prisoners, despite his initial sentence. Fellow prisoner, Ivan Lukyanov
claimed ‘we loved Streltsov, we believed he would return to football,
and not only us’, as claimed in the book, The Criminal Case of
Streltsov.

‘Strelec’s’ Legacy

Today, Streltsov is rightly considered one of the greatest footballers of

the Soviet Union. It is somewhat ironic that he tragically died of throat
cancer in 1990, and could not outlast the system which had
incarcerated him in the Vyatlag archipelago. Yet his legacy endures
and has posthumously endured a reincarnation; a two Ruble silver
coin was commissioned in 2010 with his likeness as part of the
“Outstanding Sportsmen of Russia” series alongside Lev Yashin and
Konstantin Beskov. A series of stamps were likewise commissioned
in 2015 celebrating his achievements.

Yet, his greatest legacy was the Eduard Streltsov stadium, Torpedo’s
home ground renamed in 1996. The RFU have since created the
‘Strelec’ in 1997, the inaugural player of the year prize in the Russian
Premier League in honour of Streltsov. Yet, he has never been
pardoned or fully rehabilitated. Then Mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov
and chess world champion Anatoly Karpov in 2001 began a
campaign to call for a pardon, with the latter – the President of the
Streltsov Committee formed to head the campaign – claiming, ‘If it
hadn’t been for that [the conviction], Streltsov without a doubt would
have become the best footballer in the world’.

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The two-Ruble commemorate coin celebrating Streltsov. Source:

http://tribodoscaboclos.blogspot.co.uk/

Streltsov’s defining moment had been sandwiched just a month prior

Pelé cementing himself into football history and three months after
the brilliant Duncan Edwards tragically died in the Munich disaster,
yet the Russian is a mix of the two. His superstar status was taken
away from him, but his great perseverance and survival ability saw
him playing again from 1963, and he finally fulfilled his promise to
Nikita Simonyan that he would “gain many more [medals]”.

_______________________________________________________________

Follow James on Twitter: @JamesNickels

Author: James Nickels

Born and raised in South Shields, the direct mid-point
between Sunderland and Newcastle in North-East
England during an era of sustained success and
European football for the Magpies, while the Black Cats
floundered in the lower divisions, so naturally I decided
to support Sunderland. I’ve developed an interest in
Russian football over the last decade or so, but it
piqued while studying for my Masters’ Degree in
Russian and Soviet History, and I’ve been hooked by
Spartak Moscow ever since. Considers Eduard
Streltsov the best of his generation, and a fond
proponent of his repatriation.

 Twitter

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FILED UNDER: FEATURES, HISTORY, LEGENDS, TORPEDO

TAGGED WITH: EDUARD STRELTSOV, EDUARD STRELTSOV STADIUM, HISTORY,
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